Nobel laureate and economist Elinor Ostrom earned a Nobel prize in economic sciences in 2009 for her research on a community's ability to self-govern a common pool resource with the use of eight design principles. While Ostrom's accumulated efforts to analyze these principles and apply them to community resources have earned widespread recognition, these principles have yet to take off on a grand scale as a blueprint for self-governance systems globally. There is also a lack of empirical evidence that supports these principles as empirical investigations have yet to manipulate the principles individually or as an intervention package as independent …
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Nobel laureate and economist Elinor Ostrom earned a Nobel prize in economic sciences in 2009 for her research on a community's ability to self-govern a common pool resource with the use of eight design principles. While Ostrom's accumulated efforts to analyze these principles and apply them to community resources have earned widespread recognition, these principles have yet to take off on a grand scale as a blueprint for self-governance systems globally. There is also a lack of empirical evidence that supports these principles as empirical investigations have yet to manipulate the principles individually or as an intervention package as independent variables. The purpose of the present study is to empirically test Ostrom's eight design principles in a tabletop game model of a community utilizing a common pool resource (CPR) by implementing as well as removing the principles within an adapted version of the board game Catan. In three groups, the CPR almost always fully crashed in baseline but not when Ostrom's principles were in place as game rules. Results indicated that Ostrom's design principles may organize participant responses and maintain resource levels over time more effectively than without Ostrom's rules applied.
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